Tuesday, February 27, 2007

Carol Lam, the former United States attorney for San Diego, is smart and tireless and was very good at her job. Her investigation of Representative Randy Cunningham resulted in a guilty plea for taking more than $2 million in bribes from defense contractors and a sentence of more than eight years. Two weeks ago, she indicted Kyle Dustin Foggo, the former No. 3 official in the C.I.A. The defense-contracting scandal she pursued so vigorously could yet drag in other politicians.

In many Justice Departments, her record would have won her awards, and perhaps a promotion to a top post in Washington. In the Bush Justice Department, it got her fired.

Ms. Lam is one of at least seven United States attorneys fired recently under questionable circumstances. The Justice Department is claiming that Ms. Lam and other well-regarded prosecutors like John McKay of Seattle, David Iglesias of New Mexico, Daniel Bogden of Nevada and Paul Charlton of Arizona — who all received strong job evaluations — performed inadequately.

Sunday, February 25, 2007

The dread Merkin squeezes a whole column and a nice payday from the NYTimes out of the fact that she has too much money and time on her hands - she incessantly buys and returns clothing.

I almost never return anything. In the first place, I loathe shopping and do as much of it online as possible. I recently spent several hours in a mall in Paramus and very nearly lost my mind. And the clothes are so ugly anyway, not to mention the standard plain uncomfortable. You cannot buy calf-high leather boots with heels under 3 inches. And all the clothes and shoes seemed to be exactly the same from one store to the next.

Buying clothing is stressful enough, but going back in and returning stuff only reminds me how much time I wasted having my soul crushed by the mall the first time around.

Maybe the situation is better on the Upper East Side, but I expect it's similar if more expensive.

So I'd just as soon donate the clothes to Goodwill. The fact that I never buy fancy couture helps with this - I don't lose all that much money on the deal. And yes, I am willing to pay for the pleasure of not returning to a store.

Ann Bartow I love yah, but I admit I was quite conflicted when you pointed me to this article. On the one hand, I'm flattered that you see me as a sort of antidote to Merkin's foolishness, but I could have done without reading her latest whine and literary name dropping fest. Save the assignments for something more egregious. This time around she was merely gossiping about herself - which does no harm, if you don't count the inevitable gasps of exasperation - she is not trying to devise a grand critique of the Way We Live Now based on Chapstick consumption, or offer evolutionary psychology-tinged explanations on why men disdain women over 45. If she sticks to sharing fashion facts about herself, I can resume the life I knew before I first beheld her jibba-jabba in the New Yorker, in blissful Merkin ignorance.

Saturday, February 24, 2007

Worried that a negative stereotype of the sorority was contributing to a decline in membership that had left its Greek-columned house here half empty, Delta Zeta’s national officers interviewed 35 DePauw members in November, quizzing them about their dedication to recruitment. They judged 23 of the women insufficiently committed and later told them to vacate the sorority house.

The 23 members included every woman who was overweight. They also included the only black, Korean and Vietnamese members. The dozen students allowed to stay were slender and popular with fraternity men — conventionally pretty women the sorority hoped could attract new recruits. Six of the 12 were so infuriated they quit.

- Arrested watching pornographic film with thirteen-year-old boy and fourteen-year old boy in parked car. 19 pornographic magazines confiscated from car.- Rev. Hermley was released into the custody of Rev. J. Stuart Dooling, OSFS,Provincial of the Oblates.Johns Hopkins University medical doctors determined that Rev. Hermley did notneed help. He received three years probation for the 1982 incident. On 12-7-82, Rev.Dooling assigned him to a parish in Vienna, Virginia.=============================

PRIEST MINISTRY RECORDS

The Rev. Robert Hermley

June 4, 1955 Ordained in Wilmington. Member of Oblates of St. Francis de Sales

(Dates unknown) Our Lady of Fatima Church, Bensalem, Pa.

1966-78 Father Judge High School for Boys, Philadelphia

1978-80 Our Lady of Perpetual Help Church, Seaside Heights, N.J.

1980-82 Padua Academy, Wilmington

November 1982 Pleaded guilty to indecent assault

Dec. 7, 1982 Assigned to Our Lady of Good Counsel Church, Vienna, Va.

Nov. 12, 1991 Assigned to St. Mary Church, Fredericksburg, Va.

May 1992 Seton Home School (chaplain, curriculum consultant), Arlington Va.

2001 Oblates contact Catholic Diocese of Wilmington, requesting permission for Hermley to return to the Diocese of Wilmington to minister at Little Sisters of the Poor, Newark

Talk to the alien for a while. If he/she, he-she or it can not use contractions, you know you got an alien on your hands. Either the outerspace type or just the foreigner variety. This occurred to me as I was watching a re-run of Kung-Fu tonight. Neither Kwai Chang Caine nor some Indian kid that he meets can speak English with contractions. Although I guess technically the Indian kid is not an alien, compared to the White Man.

I cannot use contractions but I will not hesitate to kung fu your ass if you do not learn my name is Caine, not "Chinaman."

The ninnies came out in droves to cry a Mississippi's worth over poor "PC" victim Lawrence Summers, when Judith Warner wrote a piece about his replacement, an honest-to-god woman. Who happens to have a background in Women's Studies. Some schmuck writes:

Her background is in Women’s Studies which is a curriculum that disparages males. Taken at face value a Women’s Studies program is itself a violation of Title IX equity when there is no offsetting Men’s Studies category, as is nearly always the case.

There are no Men's Studies, schmucko, for the same reason that there is no White History month. Because ALL history is white history. And all studies are men's studies. Great male politicians did this. Great male artists, writers and musicians did that.

And here comes evolutionary psychology - Lawrence Summers' theory of choice - to tell us why - because females are too cowardly, feeble-minded and hobbled by emotions to do anything worth recording for posterity.

Summers is a bad scientist and a worse politician. But he will never be unemployed because the old boy network - the people who still put up roadblocks for women while citing "scientific" female inferiority - will take care of him.

Wednesday, February 14, 2007

Those of you too young to remember Paglia in her glory days missed the horror of pseudo-hipster morons who considered Paglia cool and contrarian because of her constant attacks on real feminists. She was basically a dry run for Ann Coulter.

The fact that Molly Ivins penned this smackdown in 1991, but so many ninnies STILL didn't get what a cretin Paglia was and is, shows that the vast majority truly cannot discern shit from Shinola.

Here is the late great Ivin's perfect summation of Paglia, by way of Pandagon (Amanda's back!) and Faux Real

What we have here, fellow citizens, is a crassly egocentric, raving twit. The Norman Podhoretz of our gender. That this woman is actually taken seriously as a thinker in New York intellectual circles is a clear sign of decandence, decay, and hopeless pinheadedness. Has no one in the nation’s intellectual capital the background and ability to see through a web of categorical assertions? One fashionable line of response to Paglia is to claim that even though she may be fundamentally off-base, she has “flashes of brilliance.'’ If so, I missed them in her oceans of swill.One of her latest efforts at playing enfant terrible in intellectual circles was a peppy essay for _Newsday_, claiming that either there is no such thing as date rape or, if there is, it’s women’s fault because we dress so provocatively. Thanks, Camille, I’ve got some Texas fraternity boys I want you to meet.There is one area in which I think Paglia and I would agree that politically correct feminism has produced a noticeable inequity. Nowadays, when a woman behaves in a hysterical and disagreeable fashion, we say, “Poor dear, it’s probably PMS.'’ Whereas, if a man behaves in a hysterical and disagreeable fashion, we say, “What an asshole.'’ Let me leap to correct this unfairness by saying of Paglia, Sheesh, what an asshole.

People who don’t get insurance from their employers wouldn’t have to deal individually with insurance companies: they’d purchase insurance through “Health Markets”: government-run bodies negotiating with insurance companies on the public’s behalf. People would, in effect, be buying insurance from the government, with only the business of paying medical bills — not the function of granting insurance in the first place — outsourced to private insurers.

Why is this such a good idea? As the Edwards press release points out, marketing and underwriting — the process of screening out high-risk clients — are responsible for two-thirds of insurance companies’ overhead. With insurers selling to government-run Health Markets, not directly to individuals, most of these expenses should go away, making insurance considerably cheaper.

Better still, “Health Markets,” the press release says, "will offer a choice between private insurers and a public insurance plan modeled after Medicare." This would offer a crucial degree of competition. The public insurance plan would almost certainly be cheaper than anything the private sector offers right now — after all, Medicare has very low overhead. Private insurers would either have to match the public plan’s low premiums, or lose the competition.

And Mr. Edwards is O.K. with that. “Over time,” the press release says, "the system may evolve toward a single-payer approach if individuals and businesses prefer the public plan."

So this is a smart, serious proposal. It addresses both the problem of the uninsured and the waste and inefficiency of our fragmented insurance system. And every candidate should be pressed to come up with something comparable.

Yes, that includes Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton. So far, all we have from Mr. Obama is inspiring rhetoric about universal care — that’s great, but how do we get there? And how do we know whether Mrs. Clinton, who says that she’s “not ready to be specific,” and that she wants to "build the consensus first," will really be willing to take on this issue again?

Paul Krugman is the reason I keep paying for "select" access to the NYTimes.

Thursday, February 01, 2007

I delinked from Majikthese because I got tired of the intrepid girl philosopher's kewl contrarian observations, like how awful those doggie steps are, among other things - I still think of it every time I see a commercial for that humane and innocuous product. So up pops Lindsay Beyerstein as a member of the Tom Tomorrow blog team. I like Amanda at Pandagon, so she announces she's leaving to work for John Edward's presidential candidacy and puts that jerk Chris Clark onto her blog team - it was bad enough that I had to read about how great Chris Clark was in every goddam thread at Pandagon. Chris Clark already had a full-time job, apparently, of commenting on other people's blogs, as well as the occasional freelance work of offering psychiatric diagnoses. Did he really need another gig?

NOW I find that Al Franken is leaving Air America, Evil Li-brul Overlord >:D is shutting down, and I'm tired of reading about those adorable precocious children at Adventures in Ethics and Science.

My anti-racist bona fides

Although I was smeared on Tumblr by infamous bully Mikki Kendall and identitarian extremist K. Tempest Bradford (and thanks to the cozy relationship between Tumblr and Google, the smears show up in my search results), in fact I have a long history of opposing racism, and the evidence for the past 10 years is on this blog. Unhinged extremists like Kendall and Bradford don't care to know anything about the strangers they randomly smear. That's why they and the people who promote them like Verso books are horrible and don't help solve the problem of racism in the United States.